John Harris writes: What a strange, unsettling, anxious moment this is. I mean that partly in the sense of vote, but also of the emotions that are still raw after the death of Jo Cox, and what the last month or so has highlighted about the state of what we must still call the United Kingdom. Many people knew the rough story, of course: of a country cleaved by rising inequality, prone to great outbursts of anger and frustration, and now in the midst of its own version of US-style culture wars – a picture, in fact, that now applies to much of Europe, and is coming into even sharper focus in America itself. But if the build-up to the referendum has told us anything, it is that all this has reached a disturbing peak.

On Tuesday I was in Northampton’s market square, and finding leave voters was a cinch. One or two, just to make this clear, were plain racist, but the majority were not: they talked about immigration, but in the context of jobs, housing and all the rest. An hour later I was on a London tube train sprinkled with successful-looking professionals, a few of whom had “Stronger in” stickers on their Herschel rucksacks and laptop bags. They would presumably echo the views of leave voters that a young woman about to go to university had expressed in Northampton. She talked about their supposed view of immigrants: “They think they’re stealing our jobs … bringing in crime and terrorism. It’s just nonsense.”

Two nations, in short, are staring at each other across a political chasm. To make things worse, while the rightwing press have been up to their usual disgraceful tricks, the parts of the media that might offer a counterbalance have mostly failed to understand that it is the restive mood of millions of people – not David Cameron or Jeremy Corbyn, or the late entry into the debate of David Beckham – that is the referendum’s main story. In the last week or so, this problem has turned nuclear: the awful events in Birstall have made “hate” a ubiquitous trope, and the prospect of any real understanding of the national mood has receded even further. [Continue reading…]

Andrew Brown writes: In 1945, things were dreadful, but everyone knew their role and knew what their country should do. Now things are very much better, but no one knows where they belong. The post-war consensus and much of the optimism lasted until about 1973 but collapsed altogether under Margaret Thatcher. In a sense, this campaign is the last outworking of her legacy. Both sides of the argument are the children of Thatcher, who opposed the European Union rhetorically and emotionally but did as much as any political leader to knit us into the single market.

The Remainers are largely those who profited from her revolution: the rich, the skilled, and the educated, especially those who live in London and the South East portion of England. At the same time, they tend to be the people who resisted and were repelled by her message and her instinctive social nostalgia. They are, in a word, Blairites: He largely continued her policies but switched the rhetoric 180 degrees to welcome a future as quite glorious — and imaginary — as Thatcher’s vision of the past had been.

Under both Tony Blair and Thatcher, and under their successors, the rising prosperity of London and the South East has been accompanied by an astonishing loss of jobs, hope, and self-confidence in other parts of the country. There, in the traditional heartland of England, is where the Brexit movement draws its emotional strength. The Leavers are mostly those who lost out from what Mrs Thatcher did but drew nourishment by what she said. So they felt doubly betrayed in the post-Blair era, when the economics of the new order went on hurting them, and the rhetoric turned against them, too.

But the Leavers are not a homogenous group. Take away their English nationalism, and they fall into two profoundly opposed groups. By far the largest are the foot soldiers, small-c conservative and genuinely hostile to immigrants of every sort. (More than half the immigrants in this country are from outside the European Union.) The ordinary Leavers are found almost everywhere outside London, in all the places where globalization has devastated the economy and where many of the jobs that are left have gone to foreigners.

They are nourished by the extraordinary and unremitting hostility to “Migrants” in some parts of the press. The Daily Express, a traditionally patriotic tabloid now owned by the pornographer Richard Desmond, has run 37 front page splashes warning about migrants this year alone. Few were based on anything anyone else would recognize as news. The Daily Mail, its more respectable competitor, has run more than 20. Even if you never buy these papers, the front pages are displayed in every supermarket, and their effect is cumulative. My mother, who is still alive but rather confused, asked me the other day, as I drove her through the English Tourist Board poster countryside, where all the migrants were. Why couldn’t she see any since they were invading the country? [Continue reading…]

Paul Mason writes: I love fake revolts of the underclass: I’m a veteran of them. At secondary school, we had a revolt in favour of the right to smoke. The football violence I witnessed in the 1970s and 80s felt like the social order turned on its head. As for the mass outpouring of solidarity with the late Princess Diana, and by implication against the entire cruel monarchic elite, in the end I chucked my bunch of flowers on the pile with the rest.

The problem is, I also know what a real revolt looks like. The miners strike; the Arab spring; the barricade fighting around Gezi Park in Istanbul in 2013. So, to people getting ready for the mother of all revolts on Thursday, I want to point out the crucial difference between a real revolt and a fake one. The elite does not usually lead the real ones. In a real revolt, the rich and powerful usually head for the hills, terrified. Nor are the Sun and the Daily Mail usually to be found egging on a real insurrection.

But, all over Britain, people have fallen for the scam. In the Brexit referendum, we’ve seen what happens when working-class culture gets hijacked – and when the party that is supposed to be defending working people just cannot find the language or the offer to separate a fake revolt from a real one. In many working-class communities, people are getting ready to vote leave not just as a way of telling the neoliberal elite to get stuffed. They also want to discomfort the metropolitan, liberal, university-educated salariat for good measure. For many people involved, it feels like their first ever effective political choice.

I want to have one last go at convincing you that leaving now, under these conditions, would be a disaster. First, let’s recognise the problem. For people in the working classes, wages are at rock bottom. Their employers treat them like dirt. Their high streets are lined with empty shops. Their grownup kids cannot afford to buy a home. Class sizes at school are too high. NHS waiting times are too long.

I’m glad it has become acceptable to say: “You are right to worry about migration.” But I wish more Labour politicians would spell out why. Working-class people, especially those on low pay in the private sector, worry that in conditions of austerity, housing shortages, wage stagnation and an unlimited supply of migrant labour from Europe has a negative effect on their living standards. For some, that is true.

They are right, too, to worry about the cultural impact. In a big, multi-ethnic city, absorbing a lot of migrants is easy. In small towns, where social capital is already meagre, the migrant population can feel unabsorbed. The structure of temporary migration from Europe means many of those who come don’t vote, or don’t have the right to – which feels unsettling if you understand that it is only by voting that the workforce ever achieved progress. It feels as if, through migration, the establishment got to create the kind of working class it always wanted: fragmented, dislocated, politically distant, weak.

But a Brexit led by Ukip and the Tory right will not make any of these things better: it will make them worse. [Continue reading…]

Fintan O’Toole writes: The Brexit campaign is fuelled by a mythology of England proudly “standing alone”, as it did against the Spanish armada and Adolf Hitler. But when did England really stand alone? The answer, roughly speaking, is for 300 of the past 1,200 years. England has been a political entity for only two relatively short periods. The first was between the early 10th century, when the first English national kingdom was created by Athelstan, and 1016 when it was conquered by Cnut the Dane. The second was between 1453, when English kings effectively gave up their attempts to rule France, and 1603, when James VI and I united the thrones of England and Scotland.

Otherwise – and this includes all of the past 400 years – England has always been part of at least one larger entity: an Anglo-French kingdom, the United Kingdom in its various forms, a global empire, the European Union. The English are much less used to being left to their own devices than they think they are.

English nationalists can quite reasonably point out that many emerging nation states have even less experience of being a standalone, self-governing entity – my own country, Ireland, being an obvious example. The big difference is that other countries actually go through a process – often very long and difficult – of preparing themselves politically, culturally and emotionally for the scary business of being (to borrow a term from Irish nationalism) “ourselves alone”. In England, there is no process. A decisive step is about to be taken without acknowledging the path ahead. [Continue reading…]

John Harris writes: For the last five days I have been driving around England and Wales, filming scores of people as they talk about which way they’ll vote in the European Union referendum.

From ardent leavers in Merthyr Tydfil and undecided people on the English-Welsh borders to university students in Manchester who were 95% for remain, my Guardian colleague John Domokos and I have sampled just about every shade of opinion, and soaked up an atmosphere of often passionate political engagement. If a common journalistic pose is to roll one’s eyes and pronounce oneself impossibly bored with the whole thing, that is not where most people are at all.

Hardly anybody talks about the official campaigns, and the most a mention of the respective figureheads of each camp tends to elicit is a dismissive tut – but just about everyone agrees that this is a fantastically important moment, and a litmus test of the national mood.

What must David Cameron make of it all? This story is unfolding, let’s not forget, because of his ludicrous belief that a referendum might somehow definitively address the EU-related divisions in his own party and the public at large – as if a month or so of political knockabout under Queensberry rules could sort everything out, and the country could then go back to normal.

Fat chance, obviously: he now finds his Eurosceptic foes emboldened by a sense that many Conservative voters are on their side, while politicians of all parties – and Labour people in particular – are gripped by something that has been simmering away for the best part of a decade. To quote the opinion pollsters Populus: “Both socioeconomic groups C2 and DE disproportionately back the UK leaving the EU.” To be a little more dramatic about it, now that Scotland has been through its political reformation, England and Wales are in the midst of a working-class revolt. [Continue reading…]